"Affluenza" is now a legitimate defense claim.

He's rich, spoiled, idiotic, and privileged. Let's not punish him for it, mmkay? It's a tough life.

...that's...sick.

I just read that article moments ago. That is total bullshit. I hope the victims and their families make that family as poor as dirt in huge lawsuits.

Xelebes said:

Well, affluenza is being labeled as a sickness. Are you condemning the label or condoning it? I can't tell!

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Well, I think that rehabilitation is better than punitive measures. So, I don't think that sending this kid to jail will help him or help society when he comes back into it.

...but the REASON he's not going to jail is fucked up.

Didn't we found this nation with one of its underlying tenets being that privilege does NOT set one apart from "the little people" in the eyes of the law?

Didn't we leave that crap behind back in England? (The England of 200+ years ago.)

Whatever happened to "ignorance of the law is no excuse?"

Snowstorm said:

I just read that article moments ago. That is total bullshit. I hope the victims and their families make that family as poor as dirt in huge lawsuits.

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They're certainly dumb as dirt. So poor as dirt would make for a nice harmony to their overall state.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm old and I'll die soon.

So being too rich to know any better is not only a defense but a get out of jail free card as well. I wonder if someone was dirt poor and claimed that their parents neglected them so they don't know any better would be allowed the same manner of justice. This just seems like a situation where the rich parents struck an under the table deal with the judge (who I believe is retiring soon) to get their son off, and 'affluenza' was just their bogus excuse to do that.

Haggis said:

Sometimes I'm glad I'm old and I'll die soon.

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Oh sure, and leave ME all the work!

They should just start giving the 1% "Get Out of Jail Free" cards and quit making any pretense that the reality is otherwise.

He called Couch a product of "affluenza," where his family felt that wealth bought privilege and there was no rational link between behavior and consequences.

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Apparently the family was right, because the judge just validated their feeling.

Zoombie said:

Oh sure, and leave ME all the work!

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Time's awastin'. Get working on that immortality thingy if you want some elderly help.

From the original article:

Defense attorneys asked that he be sent to a small, private home in California which offers intensive one-on-one therapy. They said Couch's father would pay the entire $450,000 price tag.

Prosecutors pointed out that the juvenile justice system also offers counseling.

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I wasn't sure which he got, but according to this article:

As part of his sentence, Couch will be sent to a private counseling center that costs $450,000, which will be paid for by his father.

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The family really did get everything they wanted, it seems. I wonder about civil suits.

I had to double-check that this wasn't The Onion. This kind of stuff pisses me off.

There'd be plenty of time for this young man to get the psychological help he needs while serving 20+ years. He's got priors, and not a single brain cell in his head. I'd throw the book at him.

Rina Evans said:

He's rich, spoiled, idiotic, and privileged. Let's not punish him for it, mmkay? It's a tough life.

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I grew up in a town where asinine, stupid and dangerous behavior was the expected norm from rich brats. Spoiled rich kids did all sorts of awful things, and it was brushed off.

At least in this case, they're forcing him into treatment and separating him from his parents.

Still, the double standard implied by this sentence is appalling, though I agree that our society's general focus on punishment (at least for the little people) and incarceration is not doing anything to improve our crime rates. We spend a lot of money on incarcerating people to make them pay their "dues to society," rather than finding ways of turning them into people who don't do crap like this and can actually go back out into the world and make restitution that isn't on the taxpayer's dime.

I think psychological experts can point to a way the environment contributed to the development of most deviant behavior, but we seem to think rich kids who go bad are more sympathetic and redeemable than poor kids who do.

If this kid was poor and black he'd have been wearing an orange jumpsuit for the next twenty years after the first time the cops picked him up.

This isn't the last time the criminal justice system will hear from this guy. Bet on it.

James D. Macdonald said:

If this kid was poor and black

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someone would have shot him.

Sounds like someone got a fat donation to their re-election fund...

Plot Device said:

Didn't we found this nation with one of its underlying tenets being that privilege does NOT set one apart from "the little people" in the eyes of the law?

Didn't we leave that crap behind back in England?

Whatever happened to "ignorance of the law is no excuse?"

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Nope. This is actually sorta in line with the original revolutionaries' ideas.

The revolution was led by rich smugglers and lawyers who wanted to keep voting power in the hands of the aristocracy, and many of them also were fervant supporters of the chattel slavery system, which is pretty much the absolute worst sort of oppression possible. There were also folks who wanted to expand westward and slaughter any American Indians who refused to give up their land. England was actually restraining that expansion, and during the war, England recruited slaves and gave them their freedom.

The wealthier Founders did support some major progress, some more than others, but "poor and rich people are totally equal" never happened in the law until later. At first, after all, only the wealthy could vote. The equality stuff came gradually over time with a number of violent rebellions by regular people from that time until the present.

However, to be fair, there was a seed for that during the Revolution. In addition to the progressive policies of some of the leaders, there was actually a lot of rhetoric about freedom* that they used for propaganda purposes. The common folk took that stuff seriously, maybe more than intended, so they were sorta forced to make more concessions than they wanted. (And then there's Antifederalists and Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, and blah blah blah.)

*Ironically, one of the biggest and most ridiculous claims against England was that they intended to "enslave" the colonies. That was an especially scary concept since so many of the wealthier revolutionaries were slaveowners and understood just how much physical, mental, and sexual abuse was involved, having dealt it out themselves.

This is America; O.J. Simpson proved our Justice system can be bought off by the rich.

I'm having inappropriate flashbacks to the MST3K-riffed movie I Accuse My Parents, here...

I wish I could say I was surprised at this sort of miscarriage of justice in modern America, but I'm not. I'll be rooting for the victims' families if/when a civil suit is filed.

Is "affluenza" a short form title for the "My parents were ignorant, thoughtless fuckalls" defense?